Radical Games: Once Upon a Time Post-Mortem

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Once Upon a Time was (and still is) a project that has taught me a lot about making a video game, but more generally making anything. The first, and most important rule, that I learned was to MEASURE EVERYTHING. It doesn’t matter if your making a table, a video game, a painting, etc. make sure that you measure and scale the pieces of your project before you go about constructing it or you will inevitably have to make certain parts over again. This is precisely what happened to me, I did not yet understand how (and the gross amount of work and time it would have saved me) to scale objects. When making and then inserting the platforms into Unity, I discovered that the relative size of my platforms to my main character made the game unplayable (or at least a totally different game. What I ended up having to do was delete many of my assets and then redraw them from scratch. While it is true it was somewhat easier for me to redraw them the second time, it was easier but unnecessary.

In a way there were two types of problems that I had in this game. There were the known problems (things like: I am not an amazing artist, I don’t know code well, have 0 experience), which ended up being fairly small potatoes in terms of time spent fixing them. Then, there were unknown problems (things like: scaling, getting my background to rotate). Inevitably I ran into problems that I did not know I would have at the outset of the game. I have mixed feelings about these problems, on the one hand I did enjoy the task of problem solving the unknown problems, it was at the same time a stressful task and required no small amount of time itself.

That was in a large way the biggest time suck problem that I had during the game. There was also a large element of creating a game that balanced what I wanted to do with what I was capable of doing. The game’s theme is time and when creating the art and the power ups at the beginning I created many more platform sketches, obstacle ideas, and power up concepts than I used. For example, I wanted to insert a “blackhole” obstacle, that warped the time of the game as well as sucked in the player (and platforms) if they got too close. Unfortunately, I do not have the programming chops currently to code a black hole into my game (although I do have the sneaking suspicion it is not as hard as one might imagine). There were also many platforms that fit well with the theme of time, but for one of two reasons I only created three types of platforms. The first reason is simply time, since each platform is a clock and counts, the number of iterations that I had to create to create one single platform was quite large and it was unreasonable (and would have been a waste of time that needed to be spent on other things) if I had created the 15-20+ platforms that I imagined at the beginning. The second reason is that some concepts did not exactly mesh with the way the game came out as it was produced. For example, I had a shoe platform, the time concept being that the should would tap up and down like it was keeping time with a song. Another example would be a metronome. While both types of platforms are fine examples of the passage of time, both of them represent time in moments or in seconds and the platforms that I have ended up going with have a longer timeframe. Having both types of platforms would inherently disturb the manner in which the player would perceive time within the game and although that is one of the goals of the game, this would have been in a way that did not serve the purpose of the game.

I spent some time belaboring the character model that i wanted to go with. My options were the rain drop and the center of the clock Emits. While I did love the rain drop because of its connection to Blade Runner and the potential it had to look beautiful (luckily I got to render some of the animations and it did look beautiful), it was simply a step away from the game. Once Upon a Time, although I have a ton packed into it in my own experience, is a very simple game and the rain drop would be a little bit too far off from the rest of the style of the game for a few reasons. Not only the complexity and fluidity with which the rain drop is rendered (the rest of the game looking quite blocky), it also did not make narrative sense without stretching the narrative unnecessarily.

The picture I’ve added is a screenshot of the game as it is. The things I need to complete still are getting the other types of clocks running (only digital runs now), adding the background and background sound as well as adding the splash art at the beginning.

Author: James Berry